Is the Agent Smith approach still your plan for allowing rapid grouping with friends in the persistent universe?
TL;DRNo instant teleporting to friends: players can see where friends are and load into the game, but must then travel to them, to protect the economy and sense of travel.
Right now, the current thought is, if you have friends in the universe and everything, so say for example, you and I are friends and we want to play online together, and you're at Lorville and I'm way across the system at Area18. Well, I'll see where you're at. I will not be able to instantly teleport there, because that breaks so many different systems that we have regarding economy, just the overall feel and travel. Chris's thought process is very much like the real world. Since I'm in Germany and you're in L.A., we're going to have to travel and meet somewhere, whether that be in L.A. or Frankfurt or somewhere along the way. So that is the approach that we're going in.
And just to clear up some minor confusion that may have arisen from Kirk Tome's answer a couple weeks ago when he was talking about the party system and the presence system, being able to see where your friend is and click a button and load into the game, he meant just that. See where your friend is, load into the game, and then once you're in the game, you go to them, not the instant teleport to where your friend is.
Correct.
So no Agent Smithing.